Nabil held her in turn. “I can’t believe it’s you, Rita. I can’t believe it’s you.”
Jorge, he noticed, had slipped back out into the yard to play with the dogs but really, Nabil knew, to leave them alone for a moment. After they embraced, Nabil led her to the couch in the living room, where they sat and began the halting process of fitting together the pieces of all that had happened since they’d last seen each other. As they did, as Jorge silently brought her drink in from the backyard and put another drink down before Nabil, massaging his right shoulder briefly before he left the room, Nabil studied Rita’s face.
The intense eyes, the prominent nose, the faint blush of olive in her skin, the curly dark hair that was now lightly shot through with gray—it all brought back a rush of memories from a circumscribed but explosive segment of his life. The chaos of the early months of the invasion, but also, in retrospect, the innocence of not knowing what was to come, how much worse it would get. And also, right or wrong, the excitement, the sense of purpose, skill, and competence he had felt out there on the streets translating with her, in those first months when it was still safe enough to do so.
“Do you like your job here?” she asked him, studying his face minutely as well, and he answered yes, that once again he was able to use those skills from the Standard days in his job, now in San Diego, after a depressing eighteen months in Damascus and Beirut when he’d really had very little to do except for a bit of work as a paid-under-the-table stringer in Beirut for various Western journalists to whom Rick Garza and Marna Gelman had connected him.
Yet he also found now that he could not look into Rita’s face without thinking of Asmaa—seeing Asmaa, in fact. They had always borne a dim resemblance to each other, and at some point in that brief year before Rita was sent away, when they had all worked together, the two had blurred in his head in various ways. Excepting Umm Nasim, they were the only two women in the villa, equally matched in their work ethic and occasionally their intimidating temper. There had been times, when one or both arrived back at the villa and had yet to take off the polyester abaya, when he wasn’t totally sure who was who.
But he also saw something new in Rita’s eyes—the hollowed-out, wounded look, which resided deep in the pupils, of those who’ve lost a loved one abruptly or violently. He had not even known that this effect existed until he’d gotten away from Iraq, until he noticed an unbothered simplicity in the eyes of many Damascenes. And then in Beirut, he noticed that lightness among younger Beirutis, and particularly among Europeans and Americans, but also the gutted look in the eyes of older Beirutis who’d lived out the civil war there in the 1970s and ’80s.
It was in America, however, that the disparity was most vivid. Americans, he soon noted, had the lightest and brightest look in their eyes, the look of never having seen injury or untimely death occur, of never fearing that their state would not keep them safe. White Americans mostly, he meant—he was learning, in his job, that many black Americans and other minorities did not feel this way—but he could not entirely attach this brightness to white people alone, because truly there were so many kinds and colors of Americans in the San Diego area, such a profusion of races in one place, the likes of which Nabil had previously been unable to imagine, that ultimately one had to simply call them all Americans. They smiled and said, “Hi there! How are you today?” in big, loud voices, with a sunny oblivion in their eyes that perceived him not as someone who had observed mutilated, charred bodies and nearly died himself, not even as someone coming from a broken land whose very name evoked pity, discomfort, and shame for Americans, but as merely the next customer in line, and did he have a points card, or did he want to add to his purchase a one-dollar donation to help children with a certain ailment, or did he want whole, skim, soy, or almond milk in his latte?
And it all played out under a sun and a blue sky as reliably unrelenting as Baghdad’s, with nights that also became suddenly cool after sunset. The landscape was different from Iraq’s flatness, though, quite rugged, an endless marvel of hills covered in a kind of desert scrub and wildflowers and cut up forever by freeways.
And then there was that mesmerizing ocean, just a short walk from Jorge’s house in Encinitas. Proximity to the sea was a terrifying novelty to him. Many empty, soul-piercingly lonely days in Beirut, he had walked the Corniche and stared out at the Mediterranean, trying to fathom how it could not be infinite, how it would eventually give way to other ports: Cyprus,Antalya,Alexandria,Athens, eventually Barcelona, and Marseille.
But the still waters of the Mediterranean could hardly have prepared him for the hypnotic force of the Pacific’s waves, that endless, rhythmic roar of water cresting and then falling, spilling itself over and over again onto the sand. He would sit on the beach far, far from the water, Jorge’s large arm around him—a sensation he willed himself not to resist but to relax into, even though everything he had ever known previously told him that they were making themselves targets for harm—and he would watch the surfers in their wetsuits, shaking his head, wondering how it was that those monstrous waves did not entirely swallow them up, submerge them into oblivion.
He was shell-shocked, disoriented, those first weeks in San Diego, stumbling through a dream that was too bright. He had a room in a small apartment that he shared with a middle-aged couple, Chaldean Catholics who’d fled from Iraq to Syria, then to the United States, a few years before the U. S. invasion. The apartment was in El Cajon, a town some fifteen miles inland from San Diego that, for a few decades (Nabil had been astonished to discover), had been absorbing layer after layer of Iraqi refugees—first Christians and Yazidis, religious minorities who had never felt safe in Iraq; then Kurds and Shi’a seeking sanctuary from the vengeful wrath of Saddam after the Gulf War; then, in very recent years, both Shi’a and Sunni escaping the sectarian hell, the kidnappings and revenge killings, that had emerged after the invasion.
Nabil could not in a million years have imagined such a strange place: a town where all the buildings were low-slung and sand-colored, much as in Iraq, but where Iraqis from every corner of the country, from every ethnicity, religion, and tribe, had to coexist in an area the size of Kadhimiya, crossing paths daily with Mexicans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans, not to mention Anglos. On Main Street, over which arched a sign that read “El Cajon: 1912,” an Iraqi grocery sat across the street from a taqueria, an Iraqi gold vendor a few doors down from a store selling fluffy white Disney-princess dresses for quinceañeras. The most familiar things, he marveled, amid a landscape, a nation, that could not feel more otherworldly.
And on top of all that, he was working again. He was the only reporter from the Middle East at the Union-Tribune, and, to his near-shock, his colleagues had made a ceremony of welcoming him, expressing something approaching awe at his résumé and previous travails. He was put on a team with two young reporters: Elliot, a half-black, half-Jewish boy who had recently graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism in New York City, which everyone assured Nabil was very prestigious; and Jessica, a very short, cheerful Mexican American girl who had just graduated from the University of Southern California and spoke flawless Spanish. Together, the three of them would do stories on the various immigrant communities, including the Iraqis, around San Diego.
Elliot and Jessica ended up being not only his colleagues but his lifelines: They taught him how to drive according to American rules, helped him get his license, and assisted him in procuring, via Craigslist, a battered 1998 Honda Civic for seventeen hundred dollars. They introduced him to the complexities of Facebook and invited him to dinner and to parties on weekends.
And one weekend, late on a Sunday afternoon when he was not thus engaged, he dared himself to put on a dress shirt and some cologne and make the short drive from El Cajon, where homosexuality among Iraqis was nearly nonexistent, as it had been in Iraq, to Hillcrest, the part of San Diego that Elliot and Jessica called “the gayborhood,” lined with trendy restaurants, shops, and cafés. He parked and walked (trembling) into a bar called Urban Mo’s, where patrons, men and women, drank and guffawed while half the video screens showed the Padres game and the other half showed the singer Rihanna, whose “Don’t Stop the Music” throbbed over the speakers. He had known of a gay bar or two in Beirut, but he had been terrified to set foot in one after what had happened in Damascus and had stoically resigned himself to celibacy while he was there.
So now he approached the bar, his whole body shaking, assaulted by the pounding music; ordered a beer; and retreated with it into a corner, where he lit a cigarette. Elliot and Jessica frowned upon his smoking— journalists here did not suck down cigarettes all day, as everyone had done in Iraq—but he had no idea how he would stop, even with the various patches, pills, and programs his colleagues had told him were available to him. He was nervous, wound up, all the time, and for as long as he could remember, lighting a cigarette provided his only relief, however brief.
What was Rick Garza doing here? That had been his first discombobulated thought upon spying at the bar, several yards away, a well-built Mexican man with graying temples, laughing with friends. But then, as the man caught his stare, only to look away but then keep glancing back every few seconds, Nabil realized it wasn’t Rick at all. The man’s eyes were set wider, his shoulders were broader, his nose was less aquiline.
But the resemblance was still uncanny, and as he drank his beer, Nabil fell into a reverie about how sometimes, back in Baghdad, he and Rick would work at the laptop side by side, their shoulders touching, Rick talking in his scratchy voice, and Nabil would feel an exquisite calm course through his whole body.
Then the Rick look-alike was walking toward him, an amused, curious smile around his eyes, and the first baritone words out of his mouth as he reached Nabil had been,“Someone as young and handsome as you shouldn’t be smoking.”
And that was how it began. Jorge had told him that very first night at the bar that he was in the marines—that he was, in fact, there with some buddies from his base, Pendleton, where he was a field officer, which meant overseeing recruits in a vast field, which aimed to mimic the rough, desertlike terrain of faraway lands, as the recruits learned to eat, sleep, and survive, “in the rough,” was how Jorge put it, while they fought Iraqis or Afghanis.
And as he amiably related all this, Nabil could not help thinking that this good-looking, friendly man, who also happened to be gay, was part of the vast American machine that taught soldiers to shoot wildly into crowds of Iraqis or to blow a fully occupied Iraqi family car to pieces if they felt the least bit threatened. The machine that had often dropped bombs in the wrong places.
Nabil was so confused as Jorge kept telling him all this. How could he, Nabil, be here, now, finally on the other side of the American machine, where it seemed so friendly and relaxed and welcoming, hardly the apparatus of terror and death it had been in Iraq? As Jorge spoke, one part of Nabil wanted to kill him, he was so enraged. How could he stand here and talk so sunnily about training men to go kill Arabs and Afghanis? But the other part of Nabil wanted to wrap his arms around Jorge’s wide torso and feel Jorge’s large hand stroke his head as he laid it on Jorge’s chest.
Technically, gays—Jorge was explaining to him in that same affable twang—were still not allowed to serve in the military. But, he added, his closest colleagues had known he was gay for years now, had not cared, and had even met and socialized with his former partner. And moreover, he added, with sober confidence, the ban was going to come down before the end of the commander in chief’s first term.
“President Obama, I mean,” he added. “That fact is well established on the gay military grapevine,” he told Nabil. “And meanwhile, I’m not gonna live in hiding when I’m off duty.”
Nabil finally smiled, still feeling that prick of hostility. “And meanwhile, Mister Marine, do you know where I’m from?”
“At first I thought maybe you had an Armenian background,” Jorge replied, “but now that I’ve heard you talk—I’d say Iraq, right? I remember that accent. I was there during the Gulf War. I love the Iraqi people. We got plenty of them around here.” He sipped his beer. “Iraqis are good, hospitable people. They don’t deserve what they’ve had done to them.”
Nabil laughed, flabbergasted. “But you did it to them! To us. Your country. Your military.”
“Weeeeelll,” Jorge began slowly. “It’s a little more complicated than that, isn’t it? The original bad guy here was Saddam. And as for the American intervention, the intention was correct. It’s the execution that was flawed.”
“The intention was not correct!” Nabil said it so loudly, with such an off-key stab of anger in the high-spirited bar, that some people turned to regard him, which embarrassed him. “Not correct at all,” he repeated, more subdued. Then he looked away, self-conscious and angry. He drew on his cigarette and willed himself not to look back at Jorge.
“Hey, hey,” Jorge finally said. Nabil felt a hand on his shoulder. “Let’s table this one for another night, huh? It’s distracting me from my main agenda when I came over here, which was to ask where you got those killer eyebrows.”
Nabil allowed himself to exhale a laugh, shaking his head. “From my Uncle Saddam,” he said, proud of his quick wit. “I even once had the mustache to match.”
Jorge ran a thick index finger over his upper lip. “I’d like to see that,” he said.
Nabil’s first instinct was to brush away Jorge’s hand, lest anyone see them. Then he remembered where he was, tried to make himself relax.
He surrendered to Jorge. There was no other way to put it. In the ensuing days and weeks, Jorge made it clear that he wanted to be with Nabil, make life easier for him, take him under his wing, introduce him to his friends and family, and Nabil let it happen.
It was not only because he was strongly attracted to Jorge. It was also because, in this sunny new paradise where everything was alien and surreal, laced through with strange new rules and values, it was simply nicer to have someone who made everything easier. It was nicer and easier, at the end of the workday, to go to Jorge’s pretty, comfortable house near the beach, to play with his sweet dogs while Jorge grilled them fish or made them chilaquiles rojos for dinner, to relent later when Jorge pulled Nabil away from his laptop and into his big arms in bed, than it was to go back to the small, grim apartment in El Cajon with the older Chaldean couple. They were forever sad, dispossessed, the wife always crying, the walls occupied only by tacked-up pictures of an even sadder-looking Jesus.
To some extent, they reminded him of the parents he had left behind in Damascus.
He had called them from Beirut the morning he arrived.
“We woke up and couldn’t find you!” his mother had screamed at him through the phone. “How could you scare us like this when we are already so anxious?”
“I had to come here to find work,” he pleaded. “I have more contacts here. There’s nothing better for me in Damascus than working in a cell-phone shop a few hours a week.”
“But you just left without saying good-bye? What’s wrong with you?”
“I left you almost all the money I had. And I will be sending you money again soon.”
That had turned out to be far from true. He’d just barely paid rent in expensive Beirut with his meager savings and money from odd jobs as a stringer for journalists, the very same ones who always picked up the checks in cafés or bars and invited him to their homes for dinner, thereby reducing his food costs. He had only recently begun wiring his family a small portion of his Union-Tribune check—about the same amount monthly he paid to the U. S. government on the standard loan, arranged through the International Organization for Migration, for plane fare from Beirut to San Diego, via London.
“But when are you coming back?” his mother had demanded.
“I don’t know.”
He hadn’t told her then that he planned never to come back. And he did not tell her for another eighteen months, from the spring of 2006 until the fall of 2007, through the entire grueling UNHCR asylum process, through the shock of Hezbollah’s brief summer war with Israel, until he got his final approval and flight date. And even then, he waited until his offer from the Union-Tribune, brokered through Rick Garza acting as his UNHCR sponsor and facilitated by numerous Skype interviews across many time zones, was firm.
And then he had Skyped his family in Damascus to tell them he was not coming back—that he had earned refugee status and that he was going to California.
He had braced himself for the wailing, the tears, on the other end of the connection. But when it erupted, it still sliced through his heart, particularly the looks on the faces of Ahmed and Rana, who began pleading,“Ammo, you’re not coming back? You’re never coming back?”
“Of course I will come back,” he insisted. “Someday I might even be able to sponsor you to come live there, too.”
“We can really come live with you in America?” Rana exclaimed.
“Maybe, habibti. We will see. I have to get settled in my life here fi rst.”
After he had all but moved in with Jorge he would Skype his family from Jorge’s house, from the large marble-topped counter floating in the middle of the kitchen. (This, he now knew, was what Americans called an “island.”) And after a few minutes, Jorge would come sit beside him, crowding alongside Nabil into the screen that his family saw seventy-five hundred miles and ten hours away.
“This is my friend Jorge,” Nabil would explain. “I’m at his house.”
“Marhaba, Jorge!” everyone would call, and Jorge would call back, “Marhaba!” Then, to Nabil, he would say, “Tell them I’m taking good care of you.” And Nabil would say to his family, instead, in Arabic: “He cooks very good Mexican food.”
After that call, Jorge had asked him brightly, “So does that mean you want tacos tonight?” And Nabil, still sitting at the island, staring at the blank screen, had experienced a strange moment of blackout in which he did not hear the question. Then came a wave of grief so sudden and powerful, underscored by a frightening nausea, that he broke out not only in sobs but in ghastly wails, his head in his arms on the marble countertop. Terrified that he would never again lay eyes on his parents or any of his family, he wailed, “Ya, Mama, ya, Baba,” again and again, like a madman, and Jorge guided him to the sofa in the other room and held him, stroking his back. He wailed until he lay motionless and exhausted in Jorge’s arms, as though he’d wailed out his insides. And Jorge did not, in fact, make tacos that night but merely lay there with him until they both fell asleep, waking in the wee hours, starved, to revisit the countertop for bowls of cereal before heading up to bed.
Why did Jorge love him? He often asked himself this. His teeth needed work, he chain-smoked, he did not (he soon realized) dress fashionably, he was not able to invite Jorge to his home, he made a modest salary. He was in San Diego only by the grace of the United States’ cooperation with an international aid program for the world’s most unfortunate. This last fact nagged at him every day.
One night he asked Jorge this, after they had had sex, which was always so wonderful for Nabil but after which he would lie, mute, too many large and overwhelming feelings ricocheting wildly through his mind. On this one occasion, full to bursting with discomfort, he had turned back to Jorge, in Jorge’s large, luxurious sleigh bed, and asked, “Why do you like me?”
“Why shouldn’t I like you?” Jorge replied.
“You’re a big successful military American man, like out of an action movie, with many nice things, and I’m a refugee.”
And Jorge had pulled him in toward him with one arm and brought the other hand to Nabil’s face. “For one thing, you’re not just a refugee— you’re a journalist. And to answer your question, I like you because of this right here,” he had said, gently tracing his index finger around Nabil’s eyes. “Because I saw everything I needed to know about you right here that first night.”
“What did you see?” They were lying close in bed now, their noses only inches apart.
“I saw someone who’d been scared to death but who wasn’t giving up.”
It had never occurred to Nabil to see himself this way before. But as he mulled it over in Jorge’s arms, he decided he liked the sound of it. It was something he had been looking for but hadn’t realized: a frame through which to look at his whole life, at everything that had happened so far, and what was happening now, and what might happen next. And it was, in fact—he could say with confidence and pride—the truth.
The morning after his reunion with Rita, Nabil pulled up outside the DoubleTree where she was staying in Hotel Circle, a vast complex of chain lodgings off I-8, and waited until she emerged, behind dark sunglasses and wearing jeans, sneakers, and a men’s-style white button-down shirt, much like the shirt she’d worn the day they’d first worked together. She pulled her wheeled suitcase behind her. He got out of his car to retrieve it from her and put it in the trunk.
“Good morning,” he called.
“Good morning and thank you.” She embraced him lightly. “The weather here is perfect every single day, isn’t it?”
“It’s a lot like Baghdad weather, right?”
“It is. Minus the sandstorms, I suppose.”
“That is true.”
He got back on the highway and headed east, into the usual endless expanse of blue sky, palm trees, and scrubby hills. “Did you eat breakfast?” he asked.
“I never do. I have no appetite until noon, usually.”
“So you are okay that we just wait until lunch, and we can have some food in El Cajon that will be very familiar to you?”
“Sure.” She paused. “Why is it called ‘The Drawer’?”
“Excuse me?”
“El Cajon means the drawer in Spanish.”
“I thought to live in America I would just need your help from our English lessons in Baghdad, but now here you are teaching me Spanish, too!”
“Ha!” she laughed. “But don’t expect too much. It’s rusty. My Arabic’s getting rusty too, now that I haven’t been in the region so long.” She paused again. “It’s like a piece of your mind or your memory that starts to fade away.”
He listened, twisting his mouth. “I want parts of it to fade away. Most of it, actually.”
He now could feel her staring at him protractedly, and glanced briefly her way to confirm that, yes, behind her sunglasses, she was regarding him.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Nothing. I just got lost in my thoughts for a minute.”
He was driving into El Cajon now, that flat, sunbaked expanse of strip malls and modest homes. He pulled onto Main Street, a vast, boxy beige corridor of stores, and parked.
She turned to him again in her seat. “So what are you reporting today?”
“I am meeting a woman named Huda Chalabi. She is an Iraqi Shi’a lady who came here after the Gulf War, and she started a nonprofit that helps new refugees adjust to life here. But specifically she helps husbands and wives learn to communicate and talk things out, because men can’t just hit their wives here when they get stressed.”
He watched Rita sit up, her eyes sparkling. “That sounds like a great story,” she said.
He recognized an old posture in her, that hyperalertness she would always assume right before she plunged into a group of strangers in Baghdad, ready to engage. “Help me with the story,” he said. “Ask what you want.”
She smiled, shook her head. “You don’t need me. My Iraqi is so rusty, anyway.”
“If you have a question, just ask.”
She shrugged.
He led her a long block down Main Street before signaling her to cross with him. Everywhere, they passed Iraqis. Women in hijabs or abayas, women without hijabs wearing gold crosses around their necks, old men in the drab workaday dress shirts and slacks of the Iraqi middle class, old men in dishdashas carrying prayer beads, teens in sweatpants or jeans or soccer shorts walking in groups, blending with friends who were also Latino or Asian or black. Iraqis coming into and out of grocery stores with signs in the window advertising deals on masgouf, zaytoon, laban and lahmabajin Iraqis looking at gold jewelry mounted on black velvet busts in shopwindows latticed by security grates.
Nabil glanced at Rita, who was looking all around, mouth agape. “This is unreal,” she finally said. “Even just hearing that accent again.”
“But you knew about this place, right?”
“I knew about it, but I didn’t think it would be so obviously Iraqi everywhere you look. When did this start again?”
“Many years before the war, but the Iraqi population has really gone up in the past few years.”
He walked Rita over to a storefront with both an Iraqi and an American flag in the window and a sign reading in Arabic, “Alem Jadid.”
“New World,” read Rita.
“This is the nonprofit,” he said. “The New World Association.”
Inside, before laptops at desks in the back, sat Huda, in a head scarf, long-sleeved blouse, jeans, and Nikes, alongside two other women, their heads uncovered. When Huda saw Nabil, she broke into a wide smile, rose, and walked toward him.
“Nabil! Marhaba, habibi, salaam alaikum. You look good, hayati.” She extended a hand, which he shook briefly.
“Wa alaikum salaam,” he replied. Then, continuing inArabic:“This is Rita Khoury, the foreign-policy expert I told you I was bringing. We were journalists together in Iraq.”
Huda trained her smile on Rita. “Hello, Rita, nice to meet you,” she said in English, touching her lightly at the elbows and kissing her on either cheek. “Welcome to our little Baghdad in California.”
“She knows Iraqi Arabic,” Nabil said. “And she’s Lebanese, too.”
Huda beamed at Rita. “Ah, inti taarfeen arabi? Wa inti lubnaniya? Kolish zen!”
Nabil watched Rita blush. “Arabiti shway taabeneh.” My Arabic is a little rusty.
“La, la!” Huda insisted. “Kolish zen, kolish zen.” Very good, very good.
Nabil adored Huda, who was in her early forties and had two kids and a husband who was often away in the Gulf states working as a cultural liaison for large American companies. She reminded him of his mother before the final years of Saddam and the invasion had beaten her down—her energy, her optimism, her modernism, and her habit of always pointing out the best in others.
“Come, come,” Huda beckoned them both in English. “Come sit.” She pointed to chairs arranged before her own desk, on which were propped photos of her husband, kids, and various other family members. She turned to one of the other women and asked if she would make their guests tea.
Nabil pulled out his notebook and his recorder. He was very proud of the genuine reporter’s notebooks, with their spiral bindings at the narrow top, that the Union-Tribune had furnished him with, and he hoped that Rita noticed that he took notes in the fashion he’d learned from her, which was to flip the notebook so that he had notes running straight down two pages, top and bottom, then to flip the bottom page and continue writing on the reverse, so that when he later typed from his notes he could look at two whole pages at a time and easily riffle through the pages as he worked.
“What do you think of El Cajon?” Huda asked Rita, now in English.
“I’m very amazed,” Rita answered in Arabic—quick, confident Arabic, Nabil noted. She didn’t sound that rusty to him after all. “I knew there were many Iraqis here, but I didn’t expect it to feel like a street in Baghdad.”
Huda laughed. “It’s true. It’s like Baghdad except a lot of the old men, instead of sitting at a chaikhana, sit all day outside the Starbucks just down the street.” Then she turned to Nabil. “Okay, habibi, what do you want to talk about today for your article?”
“My editor wants a story on how you work against domestic violence in the Iraqi community here.”
“Okay,” said Huda, leaning forward, clasping her hands together. “Well, to start, the funny thing”—and she alternated her gaze between him and Rita—“I started the agency ten years ago to address domestic violence only, but it turns out, basically, we”—and she gestured at the two other women nearby—“me, Dilkhwaz and Zeinab—basically we end up doing everything, because you can’t address domestic violence in a vacuum. The whole experience of moving here after enduring difficulties in Iraq is so, so . . .”
She paused, searching for the word. “Really, it’s so violent, so disorienting. You must have felt that, Nabil, yes? Even with your excellent English.”
He nodded. “I am still feeling it.” He was aware of Rita regarding him keenly, her brow furrowed.
Huda beamed. “Exactly! So, you know, the people in our community here, especially when they first arrive, they need help with everything. Where to sign up for health care, services, how to get their kids in school, what is and isn’t legal here compared with Iraq, how to get your license for the ones who need to drive, how to drive American-style. I mean, there is so much to adjust to. So even though we keep domestic violence at our center, basically we’ve become the only game in town”—she laughed self-consciously at her own Americanism—“when it comes to the transition process.”
Nabil scribbled frantically as she spoke. “So, the domestic violence. How—how does it present itself?” He poised his pen, hoping that Rita thought he was sufficiently incisive.
Huda sighed. “Oh wow. Well, think about the context. You know, I left Najaf in 1993, because Saddam was slaughtering Shi’a left and right, and I just could not take it anymore. So I’ve been in the United States for sixteen years, and I’ve had a—what’s the word—a big learning curve for what women’s rights are, domestic rights. But think of someone who doesn’t know this and just arrives here. Man or woman, you are coming from a culture of patriarchy. Not to say there isn’t a culture of patriarchy in the United States, but you know what I mean. It exhibits itself differently.”
She paused, sipped the tea that one of the other women, Zeinab, had brought them, Iraqi-style, in small glass cups with matching saucers.
“So here, we talk to husbands and wives, or we talk to parents with children, and we say, ‘Here, when you are angry, you cannot just hit, slap.’ We show them how to use words. You have to say, ‘I am very angry because you did this or you said that.’ And then you have to let the other person say, ‘I am’—well, you know, whatever it is, very angry or sad or stressed-out—‘because of this.’ And then we ask them to work it out with words, and if any of them are so angry that they can’t, we show them how to call a time-out, leave the house and take a walk, go have a tea with a friend. Or if it’s really bad, come to our office so we can mediate.”
Nabil scrawled notes to catch up to her words. She was talking in English, likely to be polite to Rita, and he was far from the point where listening and writing simultaneously came as easily to him in English as it did in Arabic.
“And so—” he asked, when he finally caught up, “when they do talk, the couples or the families, what do they say?”
Huda smiled. “Well, that’s interesting, and I think that’s where the breakthrough comes in. Because when they come in here, and we really explore where this anger or this stress is coming from—”
She paused.
“Sometimes it’s the first time that they acknowledge the ordeal they’ve been through, you know? All those years living under Saddam and maybe losing relatives, and then the upheaval of the invasion and the violence, then leaving their homes they’ve known all their lives, being able to bring only a few things to Syria, Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, you know? Wherever they fled to first before enrolling with UNHCR and making it here. And sometimes it’s actually beautiful, because they sit here in front of me and cry, and they end up taking hands, because they finally realize what they’ve been through together. That they’re just sad, they’re exhausted, they’re angry. And they finally see it as something that they survived together, that they’re not each other’s enemies, that actually, they are both victims of this—”
“Trauma.”
Nabil turned. It was actually the first word Rita had said since the interview had properly begun.
“Trauma, yes, exactly,” Huda continued. “We try to introduce them to that concept, and it reframes their relationship, whether it’s husband and wife or parent and child. Because they see themselves as bonded in this difficult experience, and it brings out a much gentler side of them. We give them permission to forgive themselves and forgive each other because of this larger thing they’ve gone through.”
She paused again, sipping. “It’s really quite beautiful, actually. When it works!” she laughed.
Nabil scrawled, then looked up. “Is there someone I can talk to?” he asked. “I don’t need to use their full name if they don’t want.”
“I have someone for you right here,” Huda said, in a low voice, in English. Then she turned and, in Arabic, said to the woman Zeinab, who had brought them tea, “Habibti, you still feel comfortable talking to Nabil, the journalist?”
Zeinab looked up from her computer. She was a middle-aged woman—about fifty, Nabil guessed—plump, her shoulder-length hair, obviously dyed brown, judging from its faint gray roots, brushed back from her face, drugstore reading glasses propped low on her nose. She looked a bit to him like the twenty-five-years-prior version of Mariam, Asmaa’s mother.
“Yes,” the woman answered. “I am very happy to help.”
“I don’t have to use your family name,” Nabil said.
“No,” answered the woman. “It is okay. My name is Zeinab al-Jubouri and I am forty-eight years old. I am from Adhamiya and my husband’s name is Mazen al-Jubouri, and we have two children, Mazen and Amina, who go to the high school here. We have been here two years.”
Nabil smiled as he scribbled. “I am from Kadhimiya,” he said.
The woman smiled, her eyes crinkling. “Then you remember the time we would go freely between those two beautiful neighborhoods over the bridge,” she said.
“I do.”
“The Al-Aimmah Bridge,” Rita noted.
“Yes, exactly,” said the woman.
“May I ask,” Nabil continued, “what your two years in America have been like?”
Again, the woman smiled, shaking her head, as though at a loss where to begin. “Very, very hard years,” she said. “Of course, we are safe here, which is the main point. And my children love the school, and they have many friends, so, you know, my husband and I, we say that we are living for them now, for their future, because we will never be happy here.”
She then glanced at Huda, who regarded her gently.
“Of course, I am very, very happy to have met Huda and to be able to work with her,” she continued. “She has helped us with everything. And the fact that I can love this Shi’a woman like my own sister, with no fear, that reminds me of Baghdad before the invasion and all the ugliness and killing that came after.”
Huda nodded soberly, reached out, and put a hand briefly over Zeinab’s. “Hamdullilah, we can be friends here, as it was meant to be, habibti,” she said.
“Yes, it’s true,” the woman continued. “But, no. This is all for our children. For me, you know, I will always just remember the Iraq of my childhood, before Saddam, when it was a paradise. It looked like a postcard. That’s where I live—” she paused, then tapped her finger against her temple. “In here.” She smiled again, the same rueful crinkle around her eyes.
“I know what you mean,” Nabil said.
“You know where I go in my head?” the woman continued, her voice perking up a bit.
“Where is that?” Nabil asked.
“You know Pig’s Island in the Tigris?”
“Of course.”
“I go there,” she said. “When I was young, our uncle would take my little brother and me there on very hot days in his motorboat. We would bring watermelon and dolma and lemonade and cards to play, and my uncle would smoke a cigar and drink arak, while my brother and I played in the water just off the island. My uncle would bring a radio and sing along to Abdel Halim Hafez while we swam. You know,” and the woman, her eyes watering, began to sing. “Ahwak, wa atmana law ansak—”
Nabil smiled. It was truly one of the region’s most famous old songs, the Egyptian legend’s “I Love You.” So he briefly joined her: “Ansa rohy wayak . . .” I love you, and I wish if I ever forget you . . .
“Ahhh!” cried Huda, joining in the next line: “Wen dalet teba fadat . . .” That I also forget my own soul as well.
The three of them faded out, laughed self-consciously. Nabil glanced at Rita, who was smiling but quiet.
“Well, so,” continued Zeinab, dabbing her eyes with a tissue from a powder-blue box on her desk, “that’s where I go in my head. The feel of the sun on my skin, the green water up to our knees, my hands sticky from the watermelon, the smell of my uncle’s cigar in the air, and the sound of the music coming out of his little radio. With his motorboat pulled up on the sand just a few feet away. And I remember those beautiful swirls of water in the river farther out from where we were wading. Those whirlpools. Our uncle always told us to stay away from them, that if we were caught in one of them, we would never get out, and the river would carry us all the through Iraq right into the Persian Gulf!” She laughed. “But I was always so—so fascinated by them. They were so beautiful to watch under the sun.”
Nabil scrawled, looked up. The woman tapped her own head again. “That’s how I get through the sadness. I live in the past.”
“Is your brother here, too?” Nabil asked.
The joy that had briefly animated the woman’s face drained away. She shook her head. “No. He’s gone.”
“He’s dead?”
“Habibti,” interjected Huda. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
“No, no,” the woman insisted. “I can. You showed me, Huda, that I can talk about it and still be okay.” She turned again to Nabil: “A Shi’a militia kidnapped him three years ago. He was missing for six days, then we woke up one morning and found his body with his hands and feet cut off outside our garden gate. With a note pinned on him, ‘Get out before it happens to you and your children.’ Signed in the name of one of the militias.”
She paused to shrug. “And so we arranged his burial, and we left Iraq for Syria the next day, and that was the start of what brought us here.”
As Nabil scribbled, he caught, from the corner of his eye, Rita, as she rose, quietly said, “Excuse me,” and walked out of the office.
His scribbling completed, he looked up at the woman. “They did the same thing to my cousin,” he said. “I’m not sure if it was Shi’a or Sunni or both. But they shot her in front of me, and she died in my arms. We were on our way to work one morning, just rushing to the car.”
The woman nodded, regarding him. “So I have a little place in my head where I go to keep from going crazy,” she said, then laughed. “Is that so bad?”
“That’s not bad at all, habibti,” Huda assured her. “Whatever works for you is good.”
“And we live here now,” the woman continued, “because at least we are safe. I mean, yes, of course, we know there are some people here who don’t like us, but not really that many. We know it is nothing like Iraq. This is a normal country, like Iraq in the sixties and seventies. Again, it’s all for our children now. My life is over.”
“What about the work you do here with me?” Huda asked. “Isn’t that an important life?”
The woman considered a moment. “I mean my happiness is over. My personal happiness.”
Nabil looked up at the woman. “I know what you mean,” he said. He was thinking not so much of himself as of his mother.
But she mistook his meaning. “You’re younger than I am,” she said. “You’ll have a good life and take the best from this country. Look at you now. Sahafi!” A journalist!
He put down his pen for a moment. “I am grateful I have work here.” Then he rose. He’d wondered where Rita had gone. Had she needed the bathroom, she could have merely used the one in the adjacent room, clearly marked. “Would you excuse me a moment to find my friend?” he asked.
Huda waved him away affably. “Of course, habibi. Go. We will be right here.”
He stepped back out onto the sidewalk, into the sun, which briefly blinded him. He looked up Main Street, then down, but Rita was nowhere to be seen. He walked to the corner—where, peering down the side street, he saw her leaning against a parked car, sobbing, her shoulders shaking, one arm crossed over her chest, the other hand raised to cover her face. Even from several yards away, he could hear the choked, oddly high-pitched hiccupping sound she made, almost like a laugh.
He stood there, silent, just watching her a moment, mesmerized. Rita crying was an alien and upsetting sight, so utterly out of character. The only other occasion he could remember her crying in all of their time together in the villa was that bizarre moment, right before she left, when he was extolling to her the virtues of his Bibi’s bamia, her okra stew, and she had abruptly burst into tears and run out of the kitchen, baffling him.
He turned, began walking back toward the New World office, resolved not to embarrass her, but, after a few steps, stopped again. Slowly, he turned, retraced his steps, and, rounding the corner, walked to her, whereupon he put a hand on her shoulder from behind.
She started briefly, but, seeming to sense it was him, did not raise her head from her hand or stop crying. He had no idea what to say to her, so he merely began rubbing her back, gently, as his own mother had done to him when he was a very small, crying boy.
Wordlessly, after a moment, she embraced him and continued crying into his shoulder.
“It’s okay,” he murmured, for lack of anything else to say.
“I’m so sorry,” she gasped as she wept.
“What are you sorry for?”
“That I forgot you.”
“When did you forget me?”
“When you were trying to get out of Iraq.”
Oh, he thought. When he’d e-mailed asking her for help with his UNHCR case and he’d not heard back. And he remembered that, as no reply came from her after days, then weeks, he had been hurt, only because she’d promised him before she’d left that she would be there if he ever needed her. But then he had just chalked her silence up to her being American. She’d moved on. Had he really expected more?
By now she’d pulled back from him and was wiping her face with the back of her hand, one arm still on his shoulder. She looked vulnerable and childlike, he thought, as though she’d just cried out all the usual hardness in her face, that reflexive half smirk.
“Well, I still made it.” He tried to put some cheer into his voice.
“I’m glad you did.”
“I’m glad you’re here, too.”
He actually was. She was, he realized, the only person he’d been with on American soil who’d ever known Asmaa.
He gestured backward. “I should go back in and finish.”
She nodded. “I’ll go work at that Starbucks just down the street.” Then she regarded him. “You’ve become such a good reporter.”
He’d been hoping she’d say something to that effect. “You really think so?”
She nodded again. “You make me miss it.”
“You can do it again.”
“Probably not.”
“You can write for someplace else. The American Standard isn’t the be-all and end-all, you know.”
She laughed, surprised. “Where’d you learn that expression?”
“I pick up a lot from Jorge.”
“He’s a great guy. He’s crazy about you, too.”
She turned and walked up the street, in the direction of the Starbucks.
* * *
An hour later, after he’d walked up and down Main Street talking to people and gathering more quotes for his story, Nabil found Rita sitting at a table outside the Starbucks, frowning over her laptop, not far from a group of old Iraqi men playing dominoes.
“Hello, hello,” he called.
She looked up. “Well, hello. Did you get more good stuff?”
He sat. “I did. But I’m done for the day. It’s Friday, and they told me I don’t have to file until Monday.”
“You’re not on this weekend?”
“Not until Sunday morning.”
She nodded. “Nice.”
He mimicked her nod. “But,” he added, “would you be okay to go straight back to Encinitas for lunch? I have had enough Iraqi intensity today. Jorge will cook for us.”
She made some final clicks on her laptop, then closed it, rose. “Absolutely. I nibbled on something here anyway.”
When they arrived at the house, they found Jorge putting away groceries. “You two feel like branzino tonight?” he asked, approaching Nabil, lacing both arms around his waist and planting a kiss on his lips. Nabil felt his entire body flush. He still had not learned to let Jorge touch him in front of others without seizing with fear and self-consciousness. “I’ll grill the fish outside.”
“That sounds amazing,” Rita said. “Are you sure it’s not a burden if I stay?”
Jorge gestured around his kitchen. “Doesn’t this beat a sad room on Hotel Circle?”
“It does,” she said.
“Good.” Then he turned to Nabil. “Hey! You should take Rita to Moonlight Beach.”
Nabil laughed. “To help me get over my beach fear?”
“Unfair!” Jorge protested. “I didn’t say that, baby. I just thought that it might be nice to take a beach walk with Rita before we eat.”
“Can you believe,” Rita said now, “I’ve never swum in the Pacific? Can we do it?”
“I do it,” said Jorge. “It’s cold as fuck, but I love it. In and out in one big plunge. Ask Nabil.”
“He does it,” Nabil confirmed. “He is crazy.”
“I grew up swimming off the coast of New Hampshire,” said Rita. “In June. Cold water doesn’t faze me.”
“All the better,” said Jorge.
“But I forgot a bathing suit.”
“You can wear the suit my sister leaves here.”
In ten minutes, he and Rita were walking, in flip-flops pulled from a basket Jorge kept by the cellar door, down the hill, past the bungalows with their yards set with cacti and jasmine bushes. Nabil still gawked at the near-nudity of San Diego beach life. His life up to this point, he thought, had been increasing levels of public undress, from women’s bare arms in Baghdad, then barer arms and bare legs in Damascus, to the sports bras of Beirut’s Corniche and the shockingly tiny dresses of its nightlife, to this just-like-American-TV landscape of sixteen-year-old girls walking around, looking eternally bored, licking ice cream cones in bikinis no bigger than three cocktail napkins held up with string, of boys with surf shorts half falling off their waists, exposing pelvises that disappeared in a V in the front.
And here he was, self-conscious in red board shorts borrowed from Jorge and a Union-Tribune T-shirt he’d been given in a package of goods on his first day at work. Pretending at, performing, Americanness, as though he were actually laid-back, oblivious to darkness.
The beach was not crowded despite the piercing heat and sun of two o’clock. They passed the parking lots, the snack bar, the showers, the volleyball courts. That otherworldly roar of the waves breaking on the sand filled his ears.
They laid down a blanket and sat side by side, their arms hooked around their knees. Rita, Nabil noted, was transfixed by the water, by the surfers in their wetsuits, who bobbed and lolled, waiting for the next big wave.
“I think I need to just do this and get it over with,” she finally said, rising, pulling off her T-shirt. She stood over him in her one-piece—her legs and armpits stubbly, Nabil noticed, her dark corkscrew curls, with their gray dusting, pulled back in a bun. “I’m going to take a plunge for my sister. We always tried to do the first and last swim of the year together.”
“You are brave,” he said.
“Are you coming?”
“No way. I’ll watch you the way I used to watch Asmaa jump in the pool.”
She looked, for a moment, he thought, as though she were about to scold or tease him for his cowardice. Then she knelt down and kissed him on the cheek.
“Wish me luck,” she said, before running down to the water, her buttocks jiggling in the too-tight suit Jorge had given her, her thighs pumping, arms cocked and up by her chest.
She stopped briefly when her feet touched the water, shouted back at him, “Oh my God! Oh my God!” She was hugging herself, laughing, hopping from foot to foot. Then she looked back one more time and pushed forth, flinging herself into a wave just as it crested and broke.
Nabil stood, concerned. She was not surfacing. He walked briskly down to where the sand became damp, where he felt the first blush of cold shoot up through his legs. The sun dazzled on the roiling surface of the water; gulls cawed overhead. He craned his neck forward, alarmed.
Just then, she surfaced, whooping, sounding uncannily like Jorge.
“Oh my God!” she called. She’d never sounded so unpinned from herself, Nabil thought, so wild. “Nabil, come in, it’s amazing!” The sun played on her face, so that she was clear to him one moment, opaque the next, just a silhouette.
“I can’t!” he shouted.
“I know you can swim,” she shouted back. “Jump in! You won’t regret it.”
So this was the new world. He thought he’d already found it, but it turned out that there was a world beyond that world, and then another beyond that, and even then at least the creator’s intimation of other worlds. They unfolded eternally, as in a hall of black mirrors in which only the crystalline image of himself, running hard for his very life, was the constant, the bridge that lifted him from one world to the next, at once less and more of himself than he’d been a world before.
He pulled off his T-shirt, shouted to her,“Get ready!” and plunged in.